Claiming that good products cannot remain hidden forever, Efim Bushmanov has taken the time to unravel the code with makes multi-billion dollar Skype service tick.

The computer genius denies any malicious intent and instead invites Microsoft, which recently bought Skype for $8.5 billion, to work with him rather than against him.

Rather than being party to copyright violations he says that he sees an open source future for VoIP. That involved making Skype compatible for Linux users who have been waiting patiently for Skype to do that for some time now.

Mr Bushmanov told Eweek Europe “Skype presents a lot of security challenges I was simply curious to see what was inside.”

The Russian, who lives in a remote part of the country north of Moscow, has become a hot topic on the worldwide web after releasing the Skype protocols on his blog.

Nevertheless he praises Skype as a good product which has more polish than open source software.